Richard Feynman called philosophy “low-level baloney” and philosophers “pompous fools” who make “stupid remarks”. He also said that “cocktail-party philosophers never really understand the subtleties and depths” of the problems they tackle.
The well-known American theoretical physicist Richard Feynman (1918–1988) didn’t like philosophy. He particularly didn’t like philosophers. Indeed Feynman is so renowned for his dislike of philosophy and philosophers that the UK’s very own physicist and media personality Brian Cox couldn’t stop himself from mentioning Feynman’s very-often-quoted remark that
“the philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds”.
Ironically enough, Brian Cox also once tweeted a comment (see here) about a Feynman quote which had previously been taken to mean (at least on Twitter) that scientists should “stick to science” — i.e., rather than discuss ethics, Donald Trump/Joe Biden, Brexit, the Ukraine, Jeremy Corbyn, films, fate, peace, social justice, the Internet, people’s sex lives, “the future of humanity” (or “the world in 2030”), UFOs, déjà vu… and also, perhaps, philosophy itself. (See my ‘Michio Kaku and Other Superstar Physicists on the Price of Bread’.) Clearly Feynman didn’t follow his own rule because he often ventured outside of science with his (published and broadcast ) opinions… not least when commenting on philosophy and philosophers. (Hence the many social-media memes of Feynman’s words.)
Of course, as a loyal member of the Tribe of Physicists, Brian Cox claims that “[t]his Feynman quote is regularly taken out of context”. In other words, Cox believes that scientists should comment on politics and on (all?) other subjects too.
[I’m assuming — because it’s unclear from the Twitter thread — that the words “stick to science” had been aimed at Brian Cox because he often comments on issues which have nothing at all to do with science… Unless, that is, literally everything has something to do with science.]
To return to Feynman on philosophy and philosophers.
Feynman called philosophy “low-level baloney”. (What, exactly, is high-level baloney?) What’s more, he claimed that philosophers make “stupid remarks”.
Like many other physicists, Feynman’s big problem was that philosophy isn’t physics. His other big problem was that philosophers aren’t physicists. Those two statements together may seem like a crude and simplistic account of Feynman’s actual position. However, if you read his words, you’ll quickly note the lack of names of actual philosophers or any details about what they actually wrote or said.
[This state of affairs was replicated by the German theoretical physicist and YouTube presenter Sabine Hossenfelder. For example, she wrote an article (called ‘Electrons Don’t Think’) on the philosophical position of panpsychism. In that article she doesn’t quote a single panpsychist, tackle a single argument in support of panpsychism or even paraphrase a single panpsychist’s words. See my ‘Sabine Hossenfelder Doesn’t Think… About Panpsychism’.]
So now take Feynman’s claim that philosophers “never really understand the subtleties and depths of the problem”. Ironically, it’s worth noting here that Feynman himself once uttered the following (also) often-quoted soundbite:
“I think I can safely say that no one understands quantum mechanics.”
To be honest, I find Feynman’s remark purely rhetorical. After all, it’s fairly clear that Feynman didn’t have too much time for the interpretations of quantum mechanics — let alone for the philosophy of quantum mechanics. (Perhaps more accurately, Feynman didn’t publish anything on the interpretations of quantum mechanics. There are, however, papers such as ‘Feynman’s interpretation of quantum theory’.) In other words, Feynman knew all of the relevant mathematics. “The trouble was”, as science writer Philip Ball (1962-) puts it (in his book Beyond Weird), “that’s all he could do”. What’s more, to Feynman, “[quantum] theory works”; though “without our knowing what it’s about”.
One can guess (i.e., from the overall context) that Feynman’s claims basically mean that (most? all?) philosophers don’t understand the mathematics and all the technical details involved in physics. Or to put it more simply: Feynman was basically saying that philosophers don’t know as much about physics as… physicists (or at least not as much as physicists like him).
In that sense, then, theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking (some 40 or more years later) replicated Feynman’s views when he stated that “philosophers haven’t kept up with physics”. Indeed (in his book The Grand Design) Hawking went into more detail as to what he thought about philosophy in the following passage:
“Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.”
Yet, of course, if philosophers knew as much about physics as physicists, then they’d probably actually be physicists.
Did Feynman Only Dislike the Philosophy of Science?
Some commentators and readers may say that it was only the philosophy of science (as in “The philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds”) that Feynman had a problem with. Indeed Feynman did once say that “what science is, is not what the philosophers have said it is”. (Feynman also went on to say that science is “certainly not what the teacher editions say it is”.)
In that sense, then, Feynman’s position was later replicated by the American theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss (1954-) when, in an interview with Ross Anderson, he said:
“[T]he worst part of philosophy is the philosophy of science; the only people, as far as I can tell, that read work by philosophers of science are other philosophers of science.”
Despite that, Marcus Munafo (a professor of biological psychology) and George Davey Smith (the director of the MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit at the University of Bristol) have written the following words:
“Richard Feynman once claimed that the ‘philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.’ We disagree.”
Who knows, perhaps Feynman would have picked up on the fact that these two scientists aren’t physicists. That is, biological psychology isn’t physics and epidemiology isn’t physics either. So was Feynman a Sheldon Cooper-type character in that he too had very little respect for any discipline — other than mathematics — that wasn’t theoretical physics? (Shelden Cooper is — or was — a young and “eccentric” theoretical physicist in the American sitcom The Big Bang Theory.)
In any case and as the philosopher-with-a-doctorate-in-physics David Z. Albert (1954-) put it (in a videoed debate):
“What the hell have physicists done for music lately?”
To repeat: when you read Feynman’s words, it’s clear that he had a problem with just about all philosophy.
Various reasons have been cited for Feynman’s antipathy toward philosophy… That is, other than the reason that he couldn’t stomach the fact that philosophy isn’t physics.
For example, according to Stephen Doty, Feynman (as a young student) had a bad experience with none other than René Descartes:
“Descartes basically infers that his idea of a perfect God could only have been caused by a perfect God, who therefore must exist. Descartes overlooked that he could have just as well acquired an idea of God from being taught the word as a child from his religious instruction. He might as well have argued that his idea of a Ideal Woman must have an equal cause, so she must exist too.”
According to the same commentator:
“Second, while in graduate school at Princeton, Feynman sat in on a philosophy lecture. The professor, knowing Feynman was a physics student, asked him if an electron was an ‘essential object’. Feynman asked back whether a brick is an essential object. Some students said yes, but others said that only the concept of a brick or its ‘brickiness’ was. They could not agree, so Feynman never answered the question and left saying philosophers used words in a ‘funny way’.”
And finally:
“Feynman’s most annoying brush with philosophy occurred at an ethics conference. His group was asked to discuss ‘The ethics of inequality in the fragmentation of knowledge.’ Feynman wanted to frame a clear question first, but the others saw no need. They wrote their report in a pretentious academic style which frustrated Feynman, so he decided to translate it into plain English. The first opaque sentence reduced to ‘People read.’ … ‘pompous fools’ in the humanities, as he called them, were intolerable.”
Feynman’s Apt Criticisms of (Some) Philosophy
Not to be entirely one-sided and biased, it’s worth stating that some of Feynman’s criticisms of philosophy are both worthwhile, apt and indeed… philosophical. That said, Feynman’s criticisms of philosophy aren’t original. That is, some of his criticisms of philosophy had already been stated by… philosophers.
Take Feynman’s references to what seems to have been ordinary language philosophy (or, more broadly, linguistic philosophy), which he called “dopey”. In his Lectures on Physics Vol.1 (1963), Feynman wrote:
“We can’t define anything precisely. If we attempt to, we get into that paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers [] one saying to the other: you don’t know what you are talking about! The second one says: what do you mean by ‘talking’? What do you mean by ‘you’? What do you mean by ‘know’?”
One philosopher who’d made these points before Feynman was Karl Popper. (He partly did so in his paper ‘The Nature of Philosophical Problems and Their Roots in Science’, which was published in 1952 — some 11 years before Feynman’s words.) Indeed the reign of linguistic philosophy (if that was Feynman’s true target at all) only lasted around 25 years (roughly, from the 1940s to when Feynman wrote these words in the mid-1960s).
What’s more, it was other philosophers who destroyed this “school” or movement! (Incidentally, other philosophers - such as W.V.O. Quine, Hilary Putnam, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn — destroyed logical positivism too. See here.)
One notable critique of ordinary language philosophy can be found in Ernest Gellner’s book Words and Things, which was published in 1959. (Who knows, perhaps this last fact would have proved Feynman’s point too.)
Let’s now go into some detail and tackle the ‘Relativity and the Philosophers’ section of the chapter ‘Relativistic Energy and Momentum’ (which is from The Feynman Lectures on Physics).
Feynman’s ‘Relativity and the Philosophers’
Perhaps it may seem a little unfair to focus on what Feynman said about philosophers. However, in the section ‘Relativity and the Philosophers’ (of a larger chapter) at least, the exclusive theme here is what philosophers believed about Albert Einstein’s Relativity (specifically when it came to motion). In that section Feynman never once mentions the views of laypersons, artists, other scientists, or political activists on this subject. Feynman’s focus was entirely on what philosophers thought about the issue he tackles — namely, what he called “physical relativity”.
As a taster, Dennis Richard Danielson classes this section (of a larger chapter) from Feynman as a “satire” which is
“aimed at those who would reduce physics to either woolly, trivializing ‘philosophy’ or lazy paradox’”.
Cocktail-Party Philosophers
Feynman uses the term “cocktail-party philosophers” throughout the section ‘Relativity and the Philosophers’. I have absolutely no idea who he’s referring to. That’s primarily because Feynman doesn’t mention a single philosopher’s name or actually quote anyone.
In any case, Feynman then stated that he would henceforth call all philosophers who believed “all is relative” (i.e., the ones he didn’t want to “embarrass” in writing) “cocktail-party philosophers”.
Personally, I’ve never come across the phrase “cocktail-party philosophers” and Feynman doesn’t go into much detail about it. (Of course one can easily guess what he meant!) So I Googled the phrase. That didn’t help. All I found were references to Feynman’s own use of these words. So it can only be assumed that the phrase “cocktail-party philosophers” was flying around the place in the early 1960s. Alternatively, perhaps Feynman actually invented the phrase. (That said, he does put the words in scare quotes.)
At first, the way Feynman puts the positions of these cocktail-party philosophers — and what he says about them as people — makes them seem like pretentious (as well as pretty dumb) postmodernists or poststructuralists… The problem with that possibility is that Feynman wrote these words in 1963.
Alternatively, perhaps Feynman didn’t mean real philosophers (whatever they are) — just those people at (cocktail) parties who think they’re philosophers. The problem here, however, is that Feynman did repeatedly attack philosophers and philosophers without ever mentioning cocktail parties. That is, Feynman attacked professional philosophers. Indeed, when you read all this section, it can be seen that Feynman couldn’t possibly have had in mind laypersons philosophising their arses off at parties.
For example, Feynman wrote:
“These philosophers are always with us, struggling in the periphery to try and tell us something, but they never really understand the subtleties and depths of the problem.”
This can’t be a reference to philosophical loudmouths at parties. For a start, have cocktail-party philosophers — specifically — “always [been] with us”?
To be fair to Feynman, he did at times reign in his generalisations about philosophy and philosophers.
For example, Feynman wrote that “there is even a philosophy that one cannot detect any motion except by looking outside”. So at least Feynman writes “there is even a [my italic] philosophy”, rather than, say, “[all] philosophers believe that…”. This implied that there may be a philosophy — lo and behold — that didn’t have this position on motion.
So Feynman, at least here, appears to have accepted the possibility that there was more than one “school” of philosophers.
What’s more, after generalising about philosophers believing that “all is relative”, Feynman does mention what he called “another school of philosophers”. The philosophers in that school (whichever school Feynman actually had in mind) “felt very uncomfortable about he theory of relativity”.
All this means that one school of philosophy (i.e., the Cocktail Party School) embraced the idea that “all is relative” and another school of philosophers… didn’t. This also means that Feynman had a go at one group of philosophers for “feel[ing] very uncomfortable about the theory of relativity”; and then went straight ahead and had a go at another group of philosophers for embracing it.
All is Relative?
Feynman claimed that “a surprisingly large number of philosophers, not only those found at cocktail parties” believed that “Einstein’s theory says all is relative!”.
Had Feynman access to the views of a “large number of philosophers”? He might well have done so. However, he didn’t mention a single one of them. That said, Feynman did also claim that he didn’t want to “embarrass” the philosophers who held this view. In that case, then, why didn’t he simply mention some philosophical movements (or schools), positions, arguments, or philosophical isms instead?
It’s certainly true that at least some philosophers — and more people outside philosophy — did once argue that “all is relative”. The problem for Feynman’s position is that not all philosophers did so. Indeed, if a vote had ever been taken on this subject in 1963 (roughly when Feynman wrote these words), then my bet is that only an extreme minority of philosophers would have argued that all is relative. (This universal claim is vague anyway.)
So perhaps Feynman had such an extreme minority in mind. That said, why didn’t he make that clear and name some names?
Interestingly, the American journalist and author Walter Isaacson (1952-) makes various points which might well have undergirded Feynman’s own position on philosophy and philosophers. Isaacson wrote:
“In both his science and his moral philosophy, Einstein was driven by a quest for certainty and deterministic laws. If his theory of relativity produced ripples that unsettled the realms of morality and culture, this was not caused by what Einstein believed but by how he was popularly interpreted.”
More relevantly, the British historian Paul Johnson (1928-) stresses that it wasn’t (just?) philosophers who’d overstretched Einsteinian Relativity. Johnson wrote:
“At the beginning of the 1920s the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular level, that there were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value. Mistakenly but perhaps inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism.”
Feynman’s own overall position was (of course) that “it is not true that ‘all is relative’”. So if Feynman believed that philosophers held the position that all is relative, then, sure, he’d have had a very good reason to be against philosophers… Except we still have the inconvenient fact that not all philosophers did believe that all is relative.
One other problem Feynman had with the All is Relative School of Philosophers (or Cocktail Party Philosophers) was that they suffered from the malady of stating the bleeding obvious. In one particular example, Feynman basically states that such all-is-relative philosophers needn’t have stolen Einstein’s ideas in order to make their (rather obvious) point. Feynman himself wrote:
“That what one sees depends on his frame of reference is certainly known to anybody who walks around, because he sees an approaching pedestrian first from the front and then from the back; there is nothing deeper in most of the philosophy which is said to have come from the theory of relativity [].”
And many people would agree with all that.
What’s more, agreement will also have come from many of the philosophers who were around when Feynman wrote those words; just as it will come from many — or even most — philosophers who’re around today.
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